All of IainM's Comments + Replies

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Why the time factor? I don't find it particularly matches my intuitions directly, and as pointed out it makes having children arbitrarily bad (which also doesn't match my intuitions). Say we give each person's death a particular negative utility - histories in which they die get that single penalty regardless of time (though other independent time factors might apply, such as the sadness of their loved ones). Does that fit any better or worse with your conception of death morality?

(Incidentally, I was thinking about this just a few hours ago. Interesting how reading the same comment can trigger similar lines of thought.)

I think this is mistaken in that eliminating the HT and TTT possibilities isn't the only update SB can make on seeing heads. Conditioning on a particular sequence of flips, an observation of heads is certain under the HH or THH sequences, but only 50% likely under the THT or TTH sequences, so SB should adjust probabilities accordingly and consequently end up with no new information about the initial flip.

HOWEVER. The above logic relies on the assumption that this is a coherent and useful way to consider probabilities in this kind of anthropic problem, and that's not an assumption I accept. So take with a grain of salt.

0DanielLC
It's the Sherlock Holmes Axiom that the original post was suggesting we use. This would be SB deciding that she is randomly selected from the reference class of SBs. In other words, it's SSA, only with a much smaller reference class than I'd suggest using. If she uses a larger reference class, she'd realize that she's about twice as likely to wake up in a room during the experiment if the coin landed on tails, and would conclude that there's a nearly 2/3 probability of the coin landing on tails.

Looks interesting - I've signed up. Definitely interested in a study group too, both as an external motivator and hopefully to get more value from the course.

0pinyaka
Great to have you. We hit five people, so I went ahead and started a Google group here.

Well, yeah, any run-of-the-mill category theory textbook will of course load you down with examples. That doesn't mean they'll give you the background instruction necessary to understand those examples. It's all very well being told that the classic example of a non-concretizable category is the category of topological spaces and homotopy classes of continuous maps between them - if you've never taken a topology course, you won't have any idea what that means, and the book isn't going to include a beginner's topology textbook as a footnote.

5Eliezer Yudkowsky
An example isn't being told something like that, it's being shown something like that, with diagrams. A beginner's topology course is not required, the diagrams are.

I'm pretty sure Eliezer's point holds even if you only consider the immediate purchasing power of each individual.

Let us define thefts A and B:

A : Steal 1 cent from each of 1e9 individuals. B : Steal 1e7 cents from 1 individual.

The claim here is that A has negligible disutility compared to B. However, we can define a new theft C as follows:

C: Steal 1e7 cents from each of 1e9 individuals.

Now, I don't discount the possibility that there are arguments to the contrary, but naively it seems that a C theft is 1e9 times as bad as a B theft. But a C theft is equiv... (read more)

1Bugmaster
I think this is a question of ongoing collateral effects (not sure if "externalities" is the right word to use here). The examples that speak of money are additionally complicated by the fact that the purchasing power of money does not scale linearly with the amount of money you have. Consider the following two scenarios: A). Inflict -1e-3 utility on 1e9 individuals with negligible consequences over time, or B). Inflict a -1e7 utility on a single individual, with further -1e7 consequences in the future. vs. C). Inflict a -1e-3 utility on 1e9 individuals leading to an additional -1e9 utility over time, or B). Inflict a one-time -1e7 utility on a single individual, with no additional consequences. Which one would you pick, A or B, and C or D ? Of course, we can play with the numbers to make A and C more or less attractive. I think the problem with Eliezer's "dust speck" scenario is that his disutility of option A -- i.e., the dust specs -- is basically epsilon, and since it has no additional costs, you might as well pick A. The alternative is a rather solid chunk of disutility -- the torture -- that will further add up even after the initial torture is over (due to ongoing physical and mental health problems). The "grand theft penny" scenario can be seen as AB or CD, depending on how you think about money; and the right answer in either case might change depending on how much you think a penny is actually worth.

The benefit is doubled in the second case, but the investment is much larger (obviously), so RoI is not doubled. In fact, the investment is more than doubled (you have to pay for two transplants instead of one, as well as killing someone), so the RoI plummets.

0DanArmak
Thanks, it's clear to me now. It seems obvious but I didn't understand it correctly the first time around.

Wait, what? We may not be born knowing what cars and electricity are, but I would be surprised if we weren't born with an ability (or the capacity to develop an ability) to partition our model of a car-containing section of universe into discrete "car" objects, while not being able to do the same for "electric current" objects.

I'll attempt to clarify a little, if that's alright. Given a particular well-behaved theory T, Gödel's (first!) incompleteness theorem exhibits a statement G that is neither provable nor disprovable in T - that is, neither G nor ¬G is syntactically entailed by T. It follows by the completeness theorem that there are models of T in which G is true, and models of T in which ¬G is true.

Now G is often interpreted as meaning "G is not provable in T", which is obviously true. However, this interpretation is an artifact of the way we've carefully constr... (read more)

Well, strictly speaking we don't directly assume that 2+2=4. We have some basic assumptions about counting and addition, and it follows from these that 2+2=4. But that doesn't really avoid the objection, it just moves it down the chain.

Can I change these assumptions? Well, firstly it bears saying that if I do, I'm not really talking about counting or addition any more, in the same way that if I define "beaver" to mean "300 ton sub-Saharan lizard", I'm not really talking about beavers.

So suppose I change my assumptions about counting and... (read more)

1A1987dM
That's what I was trying to say, but I couldn't find a decent way to put it and gave up.

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0IainM
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I think you didn't read the comments closely enough :p